5 months on the road: Shit Road Kazakhstan!

Dear all,
Once again after a few weeks of silence we reached civilization and the opportunity to send you some news!
Our last days in Almaty (KZ) were nice as we spent some more time with our friends Elise & Mat and quickly saw again Aude, Brice (&co.).
After a couple of nights in a little hotel we got our Land Cruiser back from the garage with two bran new spring leaf and oil+filter change. We felt like it was a bit too early to leave the area so we went back to the mountain for another look on the Tian Shan mountains and it’s wildlife. This time I didn’t miss the White-browed Tit Warbler and the White-winged Grosbeak!
From there we still had 3000km to drive and reach the Russian boarder and about 10 days before our KZ visa expiration date… in most other countries this sounds doable but in Kazakhstan you just can’t predict how many kilometers you can do in one day. So we started to drive west, put our wheels on a piece of Kirghizstan that stretches a bit further north than the road on which we were surrounded by barbed wire (of course the army was everywhere to make sure that no one stops or do anything funny on this delicate border zone). Close to Shimkent we made our first stop on another mountainous area where we camped close to the Aksu Jabagly natural reserve. It is a beautiful place but we just had no time to hire a guide (mandatory) and visit it all so we just stayed on the side on a little farmer’s property that welcomed us very nicely and where birding was really good as well. In one afternoon and one morning I twitched the Blue Whistling-thrush, the beautiful Yellow-breasted Tit, White-crowned Penduline-tit, Long-tailed shrike and had a great look on a Barred Warbler which is always nice to see.
From there things started to become difficult on the road… First of all because of the corrupted police that stops you for anything … or just for nothing. Most of the time it’s for nothing (although we’ve been flashed at 68km/h instead of 50 in a stupid curve in the middle of nothing). Of course they always scare you and ask you money for such or such but this time with only photocopies of our passports in hand they couldn’t scare us much (we finally learned the lesson). So since the military in Almaty we didn’t give anything valuable (passports or money) to the authorities anymore. It’s not so easy but with some practice, if you can play as stupid as you can, speak only French or English, and start to bother them more than they bother you with lots of your own stories & bullshit, they finally let you go with just a warning or a disdainful look.
Further west we reached the town of Turkestan where you can see the impressive Kozha Akhmed Yasaoui mausoleum (some sort of a wise Muslim poet) built in the 14th century. We read somewhere that if you go there once in your life you don’t need to go the Mecca anymore (so if we were Muslims we would be done for this forced travel I guess!).
The city of Aral was our next destination. There, in the dust and constant wind we started to search for some beached boats, last dying witness of the existence of a sea there. We drove to the hopeless town of Jalangash where we did found some rusty carcasses slowly collapsing in the sand. We had a strange feeling there with some sadness and lots of thoughts about human activities, ecology, wild development, money etc… We didn’t reach the sea that is actually rising again since a huge dike was built a few years ago to separate the northern from southern part of the Aral Sea (which is now pretty much definitely condemned).
1500km were still separating us from the Russian border so we stop our thoughts and start to drive again. That is where we experienced the real shit roads that a pair of Polish bikers warned us about. They were right, the western road from Aral to Atirau is a real Hell. It looks like the road was paved once but it is destroyed like a war went over it. Full of rocks, holes, bumps, ditches, sand dunes, cracks… anything you can think of and don’t like to see on the road. Most places 15 to 20 km/h was the maximum that we could do. Our mental conditions and the car did suffer from this. Indeed, on a 250 km particularly bad section of this road we broke again two suspension leaf springs. We were just getting angry... For several days, doing sometimes only 250km per day we were thinking: how Kazakhstan and the people who live there can still tolerate this? Kazakhstan is full of petrol, big cities are wealthy and display lots of signs of richness so with all this, how can it still be like this? It is almost like an insult to the people abandoned in a middle-age condition.
One good thing happened on this road though: we met a French family, les rigadoulibres (who travel for a year with 3 children in central Asia on board of their mobile home). It was very nice to chat with them for a while, share our impressions and cheer up in the middle of the desert, on this shit Kazakh road!
Anyways, couple of days later we finally reached the Russian border and passed it without much problems. Once again entering Russia felt like a return home! Not only because we are back on the European continent (since we passed the Ural River) but also because it feels somehow familiar, almost like and oasis after crossing a desert!
First town we crossed was a good example of this: we filled up our refrigerator with vegetables and in 20 minutes we found a little garage where they could repair our broken suspension. In four hour of work the work was done using another leaf spring from an old Volga and a more solid one in the back from a truck (a Kamaz probably).
We are in Astrakhan at the moment, recharging our batteries before crossing the Caucasus. We have a 10 day transit visa in Russia and we will either take the ferry at Sochi to Trabzon (Turkey) or if it is possible we will drive to the border with Georgia, cross this beautiful country and enter Turkey from there. We’ll let you know what was our best option in our next message.
We Hope that everything is going well on your side and until next time we wish you all the best.
Cheers!

E&H